


Broken Machines

by nagasnova, SeventhAgent



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Noir, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Angst, Angsty Roxas, Animatronics, Clocktowers, Diners, Hardcore Xion, M/M, Snarky Axel, worlds connected
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 04:46:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7877131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagasnova/pseuds/nagasnova, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeventhAgent/pseuds/SeventhAgent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There aren't many opportunities for Nobodies. AnSym churns them out, and they often get scrapped a few years later. You've got to take what you can get--that's Axel's philosophy, and it's served him well in the bounty hunting business. Sure, he's gotta kill runaway Nobodies for blood money, but you can't make an omelet without murdering a few androids...or however that old cliche goes. Robots don't eat eggs, you know.</p><p>Still, Axel's gonna quit after this one. Really, this time.</p><p>Promise. (Written with NagaSleeps for the 2016 Worlds Connected Fanzine)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Broken Machines

_ Broken Machines _

Story by [SeventhAgent](http://mattmacburn.tumblr.com/) and [NagaSleeps](http://nagasleeps.tumblr.com/)

Art by NagaSleeps 

Written by SeventhAgent

Inspired by the works of Ridley Scott and Phillip K. Dick

 

~

 

Nothing’s built to last anymore.  My grandma (but I don’t have a grandma) used to talk about how  _ her _ grandma’s stove was never replaced (the stove never existed), never even repaired (technically true), was barely even  _ cleaned _ and it fired up without any trouble at all. Grandma’s one of those stock memories they give us Nobodies, natch, but there’s got to be  _ some  _ truth to that, right? Everything is faster. Clocks sell better when you need a new one every few ticks. Nobodies do too, but there are other ways they get rid of us. Less obvious ways.

Gotta stop that robot rebellion somehow.

Anyway, I guess I wasn’t surprised when my Gogs went on the fritz only a year after I got them. Green static bars rolled up and down across my lenses, getting even worse whenever a notification popped up. Tried turning them off, tried turning them on. Nothing. Zip. Had to go bare-eyed into the street like some kind of caveman.

Nothing I could do but get a new pair. No way I could make money but take on another job and kill me some fellow robots.

“I thought you were done with that, Axel,” said Roxas. The two of us were sitting in our favorite booth in the Highcastle Diner, this lovely little grease-swamp to the south of Twilight Sprawl. Nice thing about Highcastle is that they serve Nobodies. Not everyone does. There are certain chemicals (really arbitrary ones) we can’t eat. Hamburgers are on the approved list. Life is therefore worth living.

“Did I say I was done with that?” I said.

“You implied it.”

“You  _ thought _ I implied it.”

“You said to me—” Roxas paused, took a sip from his straw of Diet Snoke “—that you felt like a monster whenever you had to do a hit job. A traitor. Something like that.” He glowered at me. The unnerving thing about Roxas was those eyes of his. Big blue eyes. On a dime they could turn from  _ aww cute huggable ocean eyes _ to  _ murdervoid. _ Always had, ever since they’d unboxed the two of us. “Well?” he said. The menace was failing him today. He just looked adorable. Sorry, Rox-o.

“That’s how I feel sometimes, sure. I’m no traitor, though. Nobodies that walk before they get to go free, Nobodies that don’t obey the rules…that’s a traitor. I don’t have to feel good about killing them to know that I’m doing the right thing.”

Roxas squinted. “Your eyes. I just noticed. Where’re your Gogs?”

“Broke.”

 

 

He folded his arms. Blew up at his floppy blonde hair. “Doing the right thing,” he said. “I got it.”

“You agreed to meet me here.” I made to stand up. “Should I…?”

“Axel, I thought you just wanted to hang out. Take a walk. See a movie with me…” Roxas stared at his hands on the dirty diner table. “…or something.”

“Hey, I’m down—I’m always down. I’ve just got some business to attend to first, you know? You’ve got the contacts, sure. You know who’s on the loose…and I know five other people I could get info from too. I don’t. You know why?”

Roxas kept staring at his hands.

“You know why?” I repeated.

“Yeah,” said Roxas. “I know why.”

“I’ll come to see you at your place when I finish the job, I promise. We’ll have a good time.”

“Yeah.”

“Chin up, eh? Let’s take a look at today’s target.”

Roxas sat silent for a moment. Cheap glass clinked in the other booths. The smell of burning food rose up from the kitchen. Finally, Roxas nodded at me. He pulled a datastick from his pocket and set it in the center of the table. “You’re really going to do this,” he said. The void-eye he gave me sometimes, that was no problem…but he wasn’t looking at me at all. He just stared at his fingers.

“I’m really going to do this,” I said.

“Okay,” said Roxas. He swallowed. “Okay. Her name is Xion.”

 

***

 

X-I-O-N, with the “X” standing for “SH.” I’d seen some pretty ridiculous Nobody names over the years, but that had to be the worst of them (or the best, if you like hearing the English language creak when people stretch it). See, they’ve got to stuff the X in there somewhere with us Nobodies—it’s a kind of mark. You see somebody with an X in their name, you know they’re not human. Can’t change your name legally, and the programming won’t let you lie about it. Blazing Xs in our names, with the names hardwired into our heads in blazing silver.

In that way, the names are a part of us like nobody else. Maybe that’s why I obsess over them. I’ve memorized the names of every single Nobody I’ve ever had to scrap. It’s the least I could do, to remember that. They get to live on, all of them:

Xigbar (pirate surfer god), Xaldin (unmemorable sideburn man), Vexen (scientist with jell-o eyebrows), Lexaeus (those vowels are tricky), Zexion (no comment), Saix (sorry not sorry), Demyx (way tougher than any other Bowie-bots I’ve seen around), Luxord (graceful loser), Marluxia (admired his fashion sense), and Larxene (actually liked her in a hated her kind of way).

Okay, sure, they’re living on in the brain of the guy who  _ murdered _ them, but, ehh. Sue me.

Anyway, this name, this Xion (SHEE-ON) rubbed me the wrong way. That wrong-sounding X dangled on the front end of the name, limp, like something vestigial about to fall off. A verbal appendix.

I had a few hours to kill on the plane to North Twilight Sprawl, and I used them to look over the dossier Roxas had put together for me. It was thinner than usual—Roxas usually stuffed the manila folders to bursting with photos, certificates, licenses, purchase histories and the like. There were only a few pages in this one.

The first—like usual—was the Certificate of Manufacture from AnSym. Nothing weird about it. Something like:

 

           Unit Number: D-1O4Ni.

           Assigned Gender: MALE (init) / FEMALE (self-reconfigured)

           Given Name: “Xion”

           Appearance: D-TYPE-BLUE

           Work-Type: MENIAL / VERSATILE

 

Usual stuff. The bit about gender always cracked me up, though. Humans are obsessed with that stuff, you know? Us Nobodies, we have fun playing around with it. We’re already on the edge, after all. If they’re not going to let us in on their games, no point in playing by their rules.

There were a few pictures of Xion herself. All of them were grainy and rough, like those old newspaper photos you see in the movies. She cleaned up well—her trail, I mean, but she sure didn’t look bad either. Was it her smile (the not-smile, the I-am-not-smiling-smile) that reminded me of Roxas?  Or, no, maybe it the eyes. The two of them were both D-TYPE for sure. I wondered if they looked the same right out of the box.

It was pretty funny till I started wondering how it’d feel to kill somebody who looked just like Roxas.

A few more certificates followed—menial labor license, outside travel license, companionship license, monetary license, gog license. Again, nothing most of us don’t have.

The last—work history—was the part that freaked me out. Xion’d been around more professions than most Nobodies, and I wondered why. Bad luck? Bad owners? Or was she just a pain in the ass to deal with? They mostly kept her in menial labor (dishwasher, fast food, a long stint as Cinderella at Disneyland, a butler) outside of the requisite stint in sleaze we all endure, one way or the other.

The menial labor tapered off, though…and I started seeing programming. Had to read the line a few times to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. They’d let a Nobody program. Legally! They had to be nuts. It’d be like making one of us a police officer or something.

Naturally, I expected that to be the end of the work history—one last programming job before she ran. And god help me, I was wrong. Programming job after programming job, higher and higher in the hierarchy till she was an assistant manager at AnSym itself.               

And then, suddenly—just a couple of months ago—nothing. No termination report, no resignation, not a single formality. Just a hyperintelligent Nobody who could probably reprogram anything, up to and including herself.

Or me, I guess.

I took a deep breath to chill…before remembering that I was flying coach on an airplane. Instead of feeling refreshed, I felt intimately acquainted with the sewage-and-coffee body odor of the haggard businessman sitting next to me.

Roxas taught me a trick for situations like this. See, time doesn’t exist—or at least, it doesn’t exist outside of our heads. With a little training, us Nobodies can speed up or slow down time whenever we want. It’s all about presence. You extend yourself outward, from the deep roots in the center of your skull (this one’s for the humanoid intelligences, folks), down to your neck, to your chest and outward, farther till you can feel your mind tingling in your fingertips. Study every sensation. Don’t let any pass you by.

Or do. Depends on if you want to slow down or speed up. Roxas and I, we would sometimes spend only minutes together a day. The two of us have a lot of stuff going on in our lives, after all. But we would cling to each millisecond with one another, hold them in our hands, hold each other.

Warmth magnified, stretched out past words for time.

You know how it goes, though. Extend it as far as you want—all things pass into the night, in the words of somebody-or-other. It just so happened that our nights were often just fifteen or twenty minutes at the most.

Sitting there next to my Salaryman friend, I tried to pull myself together, pull a Roxas, and fast-forward myself straight the hell out of the plane.

There’s one last thing about the Roxas trick, though. You’ve got to be  _ able _ to pull yourself together. I couldn’t. Closing my eyes, lying as far back as I could in the tiny coach compartment, I could only pull myself right into my chest before nerves started tearing me to pieces.

You can’t do shit without a gog. I didn’t like this,  _ nobody  _ liked this. Just the sort of thing you had to do. Keep the peace, you know. Law and order and junk. So what if the file was a few pages shorter than it should be? So what if the file crashed instead of just ending? So what if this particular target was giving me doubleplus bad vibes? So what if all I could think of in that coach was Roxas frozen in twenty minutes, his fingers soft and warm on the back of my neck, eyes blue so blue so empty-lovely-blue…

 

***

 

Twilight Sprawl is an all-in kind of city, a city where everything’s in excess. The south of the sprawl is pure neon and grime—stupid fire hazard amounts of neon. Dropping acid’s unnecessary in the south sprawl; all you gotta do is wait for a rainy day (ain’t rare here) and watch the colored lights hit the water.

But if the south is all neon and grime, the north is all age and dimness. We’re all poor here, but this—this part of the city two hundred miles from home—this is a different kind of poverty. The homeless travel in packs here for safety, wandering nervous in the shadows, ducking behind corners of crumbling two-hundred-year-old buildings. Gangs of old men fight tiny wars over what little food makes its way here to the north sprawl.

North Twilight Sprawl is also home to a lot of runaway Nobodies. It’s pretty perfect, when you think about it. No rent. No corporate surveillance because no corporations want to put forth the effort. This is a place where people disappear.

The trick is to disappear without somebody wiping your ass from the face of the earth. That’s the hard bit.

I hung around the North Sprawl Airport for a couple hours, enjoying the clean air and decent lighting while I still could. While I was kicking back in the concourse, a flight attendant caught up with me with a package.

“You Axel?” he said. He added a little hiss to the “X” to make sure I knew just how much he disapproved of me being a killer robot.

“No, I’m Princess Leia,” I said. He threw the package at my head. It kills me, the way some of these humans act—really, it does. The way they try and cover up how scared they are by puffing up their chest and throwing shit. It’d be adorable if it wasn’t so pathetic.

In the package was a brand new set of Gogs—damn fine gogs at that. Firaja brand. Painless neurostimulators, 19K TH v-card, military surplus apps, a ten-year-warranty, and all feather-light to boot. There was a note at the bottom of the box:

 

           “Axel—

           There. You don’t have to do this now. Come home.

           —R”

 

I was already wearing the gogs when I read it, so I could see that the paper was AR-coded. Little cartoon hearts bubbled up around the R, swirled around the letter and popped.

I folded up the letter and stuffed it in my pocket. It was nice of him to send me the Gogs, and I felt bad about what I had to do…but I  _ had _ to do it. You’ve got to have a sense of honor to do what I do, you know?

If you don’t live with honor, you’re not really living.

 

***

 

               There were a number of reasons Xion could’ve been holing up in an old clocktower. None of them made much sense after you gave ‘em half a thought:

1.) The place just so happened to be abandoned at the moment she dashed off from her comfortable, annoying idyllic life at AnSym to become a fugitive. But why here? Why not something way smaller, somewhere just as abandoned (you’re swimming in abandoned buildings in North Twilight Sprawl) and less noticeable than a  _ huge antique clocktower _ ?

2.) The layout of the place was solid from a strategic standpoint…except, you know, it wasn’t. Maybe there’d been a wide open space around it to let people into the train station—the one that used to run right behind the tower. Not anymore. A shantytown bustled at the base of the tower now, ragged tents full of the ragged selling ragged goods. Any killer-for-hire (that is, yours truly) could get lost in the crowd with ease.

3.) Roxas’s information was wrong. Thing was, his information was  _ never  _ wrong. The guy knew his stuff.

4.) Only one that made sense to me at the time: Xion was just really, really dramatic.

‘Course, all of these guesses were wrong…but I’m getting ahead of myself. Right then, standing by the base of the clocktower, I started to grin like a doofus. The dramatic ones are  _ easy _ . I did a check around the area again for any security. Nothing. And if these powerhouse new gogs didn’t pick up anything, there  _ wasn’t _ anything.

I fished around in my jacket-pocket for my KeyBlade, pointed it at the door to the clocktower, and let the thing start slicing through the locks. Streams of data poured over my vision—not strictly  _ necessary  _ for my job, but I like to have a look at the back-end when I’m hacking.

The door clicked open in five seconds, and that’s when I should’ve bolted. Should’ve realized that something was wrong then and there, turned and taken a plane right the hell back home to think this mess over.

Instead I just chuckled at the password:

“azkkm_ _ tears_in_the_rain_ylwpo9998316498_**^1982 _ .”

So, her personality matched her looks—she was a little emo, and she’d probably found some song lyrics for a password. I reached for my gun, took a deep breath, and threw open the door.

Nothing. I was pointing my pistol at flecks of dust. Another deep breath. Swallowed. Security scanner Gog app: nothing, nobody. Empty.

_ This is the wrong place _ , I thought, again.  _ It’s got to be _ . I was about to turn back for the door when I heard laughter—bright, tinkling laughter. I scanned the old train station ahead and saw nothing except broken down train cars. No life, no tech.

Laughter again, through the door to the stairwell. The butt of my gun was slick with sweat now. I gripped harder.

“You’re taking a long time, aren’t you?” said the voice from upstairs. “Can we just get this over with?”

The stairwell wasn’t falling apart, at least. That would’ve been a hell of a way to go, right? Up and up it wound, and not a hint of anything wrong with any of my five (or with the Gogs, maybe six) senses. All the way to the top, I detected nothing at all.

The door at the top of the clocktower was dark, solid wood. Long cracks ran from the bottom to the ceiling, streaked with rot and ancient stains. The grinding of gears rumbled in the floor, in the walls and in my feet. “You want to get this over with, right?” I said, pointing the gun at the door. “Why don’t you let me in?”

“You must think I’m stupid,” said Xion. Footsteps.

“ _ Well _ .” I blasted at the door three times. The thing shattered, cracked, flew off its hinges to the end of the room.

“I’m not  _ that _ stupid,” said Xion, from the darkness of the room. “Listen. You want to talk before you shoot me? I think it’d do you some good.”

“Not really, no.”

“Hey, I’m coming quietly, aren’t I? I’m trying to be nice. You wanted easy money, right?” She stepped into my view and beamed. “Here I am. So could you at least not shoot me for a minute or two? I haven’t had a good conversation in months. Come on in—pull up a chair.”

Without lowering the gun, I stepped inside.

Xion looked good for somebody hiding out in a clocktower, I’ll give her that. Her black hair shined in the dim light of the tower room. She was a black silhouette in front of the white face of the clock. Her eyes shined as if she stood in sunlight or was trying not to cry.

She was dressed in the long, black coat that those Nobodies these days find so fashionable. Everyone wants one.

(Okay, fine—I want one too.)

“Sit down,” she said, pointing at a beaten-up old armchair to my right.

“Thanks, I’m fine. Nice place you’ve got here. Very…gothic.”

The long hand of the clock lurched. “I’m a machine. If I’m going to die, shouldn’t I be surrounded by machinery?”

My stomach twisted, and I got that feeling again—that certainty that something was wrong, that I wasn’t seeing something. Something rustled in the bare, empty room.

“I made a promise to someone,” said Xion. Her false smile disappeared, and she looked up at me with wide, pained eyes. “Someone I care about a lot. I want to respect that promise. So—here it goes. You listening, Axel? Because I’m only going to say this once.”

The rustling again. My breath caught in my throat. “How do you know my name?”

“You need to go home right now,” said Xion, ignoring me. “This is your chance. I wasn’t even going to  _ give _ you this chance, by the way, but…seeing you? In the flesh? It’s different. I don’t want to kill anyone. Not even you, for all you’ve done. You like names, right? How’re these?

She took a step forward, and I…I stepped back.

“Xigbar, Xaldin, Vexen,” she whispered, chanting them like a magic spell. “Lexaeus, Zexion, Saix.” She took another step forward. “Demyx, Luxord, Marluxia, Larxene. I’ve seen them die, Axel. You think there’s anything left in the world that’s not on tape somewhere? You think I haven’t heard of you? And for all of this—for all the people I’ve  _ watched you kill _ —I’m giving you an out.”

I unloaded the rest of my cartridge into her. She didn’t move an inch.

The whole room rustled.

“And that’s what you’re going to do with it,” said Xion. She stepped into me and waved her hand through my gun. “I already told you, Axel. I don’t want anybody to die. You’re a slave that hunts slaves. Doesn’t that mess you up? Don’t you even  _ know _ ? Do you think about  _ anything _ ?”

Hands shaking, I managed to stuff another round in the chamber.

“What, you’re going to shoot a hologram again?” said Xion. “You really _ don’t  _ do much thinking, do you? Goodbye, Axel. I really am sorry…and not just about breaking my promise to your friend. I’m sorry about everything.”

Xion vanished. The rustling turned into the whirr of machinery. Snow—junk data—flooded my vision. And just barely, I could see  _ them _ through the snow moving, springing to full life.

Animatronics. Disney™®© animatronics, screeching old distorted catchphrases through worn speakers. The hinge on Donald Duck’s jaw bounced as he ran at me, grabbed me by the collar and  _ hissed _ . Smell of oil. Words sped up into a warped digital scream.

Donald tossed me from one end of the room to another. Something cracked. Coolant dripped from an open wound in my torso. I wiped oil from my nose and fumbled around for my gun.

 

 

Goofy the Goddamn Psychotic Robot Dog leaped halfway across the room and onto the back of my hand. Metal boots. Crack. The sound from his mouth—that slow laugh of his—slowed to a long growl. He lowered his head. The tongue dangling from his—from its—mouth bobbed obscenely, a faded dry pink cloth vaguely resembling flesh.

I grabbed the gun with my other hand and fired two rounds into its head. Goofy stumbled back, twirled like a ballerina, and collapsed. Snow White stepped into the room, gasped (what a shriek), and pulled a revolver from her pocket. I got her just as she was about to fire, right in the shoulder. The arm snapped off, the gun flew cartoonishly off and the trigger went. The bullet bounced around the room before landing in good ol’ Goofy, prone on the floor.

Two bullets left. Donald took a step forward, eyeing White’s revolver. A dizziness hit me. A joke—this was all a joke. If I died or if I lived, it would all always and forever be a joke.

Donald’s wide plastic eyes flicked from the gun to Goofy on the floor. They lingered there for what felt like a long, long time. Flick. Back to me. The hinge of his—of its—beak bounced. From the speaker in its mouth, a quiet and high-pitched squeal rose higher and higher. The eyes flicked from me to Goofy to me to Goofy, and the animatronic dived for the gun.

Bang. Tore into the sailor suit and the mechanical body. Bang. The eyes were little shards of plastic.

The lenses of the gog flashed. Balloon bubbles popped into my vision:

“CONGRATULATIONS! YOU WON!”

I left the goddamn goggles in the clocktower.

 

***

 

Roxas’s apartment was unlocked and stripped completely bare but for a short letter on the floor, in the dust-imprint of the old couch. Don’t know why I bothered to read the letter. I knew what it was going to say, after all. I guess I just hate myself.

 

_ Xion says you’re not going to survive what she left for you. I know better. You’re strong, you’re smart, and you always find a way. Always. _

_ You also deserve nothing from me except hatred, because you’re a disgusting monster who needs to die. There’s something wrong with you. I guess there’s something wrong with me too, for loving you anyway. _

_ That’s where me and Xion disagree, though. She thinks there’s something in you that’s just wrong, and there’s no fixing it. Me? I think there’s something inside you that’s broken, and I spent a long, long time trying to fix it. _

_ I can’t do that for you anymore. I couldn’t keep passing you dossiers and telling myself that you’re doing the right thing, that these are bad people.  Even if I stopped giving you info, you’d keep on killing. We both know that. _

_ Is it because you hate something? Humans? Us? Yourself? I’ve run it through my head again and again, and I’ve run it by Xion when I met her and decided not to tell you about her—not anything real, at any rate. We can’t figure you out. _

_ You’re hateful and angry and sad, and you always find a way. This time? Don’t. Stay home, Axel. Think things over. _

_ Fix yourself. _

_ \--Roxas _

 

I crumpled the letter and stuff it in my pocket, knowing I’d just unfold it and smooth it under a book or something when I went back home. (I did that right after a few stitches, a cooling refill, and a fingerjoint replacement.)

Lying back on the bed in my apartment, I traced patterns in the ceiling with my eyes. Hearts. Mickey Mouse heads. The silhouette of Roxas, of Xion. Guns. Fire. Then just a long, long stare into the white.

For a moment I thought:  _ I could stay here for the rest of human existence. I could speed up time till they’re all dead, each and every one of them. Play the cockroach and let the clocks wind down on human existence, on android existence, on cellular life. Wake up in the ruins—maybe beneath a few layers of rock, maybe not—and wake up to watch the red sun rise over the end of the world. _

I thought about it for a long time. I even started getting myself in the mood, doing the sensation exercises, lying back and locking my door for the big sleep.

Instead I picked up my gun, opened the window, and threw the thing out.

And then I ran out into the street to get it back.

Those things are expensive, you know.  
  



End file.
